"What! now—when in heart and soul she is the wife of another? Never! Much as I love her still, though on her bended knees she implored that love, I swear to thee, Sir Earl, by God and St. Mary, I would withhold it! I love her, 'tis true—but oh! not with the same passion as of old. Thou hast rifled my flower of its perfume, and broken the chain that love and innocence cast around it. Though Anna still, she is no longer the Anna who was the idol of my first day-dreams. No, my lord, to me her love would now be but a mockery and an insult."
"By the mass! but I love thy spirit, and if I could be thy friend"——
"Friend!" reiterated Konrad with a bitter smile; "no, my lord—that thou never canst be!"
"Then what devilish errand brings thee now to Scotland?"
Konrad hesitated in replying, for he was so much in the Earl's power that some subterfuge was necessary.
"Is it to seek vengeance on me, or to compel me to do some manner of justice to thy false lemane?" asked Bothwell, haughtily.
"Justice? hast thou not wedded another after thy deliberate espousal of her?"
"Dost thou deem the mock blessing of yon mad hermit a spousal rite?" exclaimed the Earl, laughing; "what passed well enow for a marriage on the half-barbarian shores of thy native fiord, will scarcely be deemed one in this reformed land of stern superintendents, ruling elders, and wrathful ministers—ha! ha!"
Konrad repressed his rising passion, and his hand involuntarily sought the pommel of his dagger; but the recollection of Anna, lying helpless and faint among the ruins of the desolate Priory, made him adopt the less hostile course.
"I go to push my fortune under the banner of some of your border chiefs and turbulent nobles, for thou hast made me loathe the land of my birth, though there I have garnered up my heart; and sadly the memory of its dark blue hills and waving woods cometh ever to my mind; and if, Lord of Bothwell, in the strife that all men say will soon convulse this land, thou meetest Konrad of Saltzberg in his helmet—look well to thyself; for by the bones of Olaus! in that hour thou mayest need the best of thy mail and thy manhood to boot."